


Certain Half-Deserted Streets

by Lauren (notalwaysweak)



Category: Big Bang Theory
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Zombies, Community: sheldon_penny, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-30
Updated: 2011-07-30
Packaged: 2017-10-21 23:42:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/231178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notalwaysweak/pseuds/Lauren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Penny and Sheldon go to Boulder, after all, and it’s via Vegas, and even though they’re not in a Stephen King novel, maybe there’s a darkness there anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Certain Half-Deserted Streets

**Author's Note:**

  * For [damalur](https://archiveofourown.org/users/damalur/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Maybe I'm a Lion](https://archiveofourown.org/works/169861) by [damalur](https://archiveofourown.org/users/damalur/pseuds/damalur). 



> Written for the summer 2011 remix challenge at [Paradox](http://sheldon-penny.livejournal.com/). More sequel to than remix of Damalur's "Maybe I'm A Lion" (I urge you to read it first). Thanks to [Ms. Margin](http://archiveofourown.org/users/anemptymargin/pseuds) for her excellent (as usual) beta. The characters belong to Bill Prady and the title belongs to T.S. Eliot.

It’s foggy when they leave Pasadena. _Foggy_ , what the fuck. Penny’s found them a pickup with the keys still in the ignition that’s practically brand new and fuels up, fills extra gas cans and puts them in the bed while Sheldon stands there with a shotgun and they both pretend that a spark at the wrong second won’t render this whole endeavor pointless.

She said yes to him last night, yes to Boulder, yes to a thousand-damn-mile road trip, and he grabbed her hand and squeezed it in the dark, and it was almost like affection.

They have to go slow out of the city. Most people, when there’s a zombie outbreak, don’t pull their cars neatly off the road. Most people, when there’s a zombie outbreak, panic and end up dying. Penny hears things pop and crunch under the sturdy tires of the truck and will not let herself wonder who they were.

Sheldon sits bolt upright in the passenger seat, shotgun across his knees, staring through the fog. The back seat is full of essentials. Most of the essentials are lethal. Blankets and clothes take up one floorboard. The food’s mostly cans and is in the bed with the extra fuel.

By the time she turns onto I-15 north, the fog has lifted and the sunshine is obscenely cheerful and Sheldon scans the radio band only once, just in case. It’s all white noise.

Penny absently plugs her phone into the charger hooked into the lighter without even thinking about it and Sheldon grabs her wrist, only a thin stretch of skin between them keeping bone from scraping on bone.

“Jesus, Sheldon!” She twists her arm to make him let go and puts her hand back on the wheel.

“We could try _calling_ people,” he says, voice febrile with realization.

“If the damn charger works.”

She’s been carrying her phone in her pocket for weeks, even after the battery died, just in case the power came back on. (And the streets cleared. And all her friends came home. And when she woke up in the morning it was all just a dream.) She doesn’t even know if it will work.

* * *

They’re an hour along I-15, and Sheldon says, “Is the phone working yet?”

Penny, navigating around a three-car pileup, just flicks her eyes sideways at him and he takes the hint to check it for himself. She can hear the soft burring of the dial tone, the bleeps as he navigates her contacts list, and then the idiot robot voice telling him to hang up and try again.

“Guess not,” she says, trying not to sound bitter.

He tries some other numbers, and gets the same result each time. In the end he tucks her phone into her pocket and starts charging his own phone. She wonders why he didn’t take over the charger as soon as he knew she had it and thinks it’s because he probably saw this coming.

He doesn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. His fingers keep twitching in his lap like confused spiders. Finally, Penny pulls over and unbuckles her seatbelt.

“Your turn to drive.”

“But Penny—”

“The road’s almost clear and the only pedestrians are dead. _Drive_.”

It’s a matter of some maneuvering to swap seats, since neither of them particularly feels like getting out. Somehow it’s not as easy to be pressed intimately together in broad daylight. It’s ridiculous.

There are enough cars along the road that Sheldon has to do a bit of weaving to pass through. Penny settles into the passenger seat and chews slowly on a Slim Jim (their first stop outside of town was an abandoned 7-11 full of things that weren’t baked beans, and Sheldon didn’t want to stop yet, and Penny didn’t let him decide for her). If she ignores the lingering taste of the plastic wrap it almost tastes like real food.

She is lulled into a light doze by the car’s creeping movements, jerked awake every so often by Sheldon’s sudden application of the brakes.

In this semi-sleep state, her mind mulls over the things she ruthlessly pushes away while awake, all the what-ifs and the like. What if Leonard and Howard and Raj are still alive. What if Boulder’s mythical safe place turns out to be a lie. What if Sheldon hadn’t panicked and bolted home as soon as the outbreak started. She’s too tired for them to become concrete questions; instead they’re solid scenarios that each play out in her head. She lets out quiet whimpers in her not-sleep and, all-unknowing, her fingers twitch in her lap.

* * *

Penny wakes up only once during the next two hours and that’s to roll down her window and vomit out of it, the Slim Jim coming up along with a spray of water that trickles down the side of the car.

“Have to go through the car wash now,” she murmurs.

Sheldon pulls over long enough to give her clean water and a mint. Penny takes what she’s given and slips back into her fitful doze. They aren’t moving very fast but the cool breeze of their slipstream is nonetheless soothing.

* * *

The next time that she wakes up it’s to Sheldon shaking her shoulder and shoving one of the guns into her hand and she’s too bleary to recognize it until she’s already jamming the barrel of it against the face looming in through her window and pulling the trigger. The recoil sends her backward across the center console and would send her into Sheldon’s lap if it weren’t for her seatbelt. The body falls away from the car but there’s another, and another, and another.

Finally the bodies have all fallen back from the car.

“M1,” Sheldon says, voice shaking with something close to hysteria.

“Sheldon, what the hell was that?”

“I think they smelled the—” He gestures vaguely at her side of the truck. “The—” And then he’s clawing his own door open and making noises that make Penny want to be sick again. She hastily unhooks her seatbelt and gets out of the pickup, swinging easily from seat to roof the way she hasn’t done since she was a kid.

She never had a gun in her hand as a kid.

The road ahead of them is solidly blocked, and she can’t tell where they are. Desert hardpan stretches away to the horizon all around, except for the one forlorn line of the road. She can see the long lean shape of a bus a few cars ahead. Now she knows why there were so many bodies, and how so many of them could still be moving after six weeks in the sun.

Sheldon’s door slams and Penny climbs back down in case he decides to get moving, but he just leans forward, head against the steering wheel, and sighs. Penny grabs one of the blankets from the back to wipe down her door. In her head she feels calm and ready; it’s only when she looks down and sees her hands jittering that she realizes how close she is to losing it.

She tosses the blanket indifferently aside and gets back into the truck, and this time makes sure her window is tightly closed. This means that sweat starts popping out all over her arms and forehead within seconds.

“Sheldon, we have to keep going.”

“The road’s blocked.”

“Oh, for God’s sake. Move over, genius.” She drags him out of the driver’s seat, scoots into it herself, and begins the task of navigating around the bus.

“Penny, don’t – Penny, the desert’s not safe to drive in. Do you have any idea how many sinkholes get fixed every year?”

“Relax, Sheldon, it’s only for a—” The truck tips sickeningly sideways as one tire hits a shallow depression in the ground and Penny’s knuckles go white on the wheel.

“See?”

“It was a fucking _pothole_. I grew up in _Nebraska_.” And Penny gives it all she’s got, because the only way out is through.

* * *

They don’t make it to Boulder that night, of course, or even to Vegas. They make it to a little shithole beside the road that’s comprised of one gas station with a convenience store attached, and one shack out the back that’s presumably the manager’s house. There are half a dozen cars parked – or at least stopped – on the gas station forecourt, so they can’t get the truck in there. Penny has to refuel the truck from the gas cans and then refill the gas cans from the pumps, and it’s lucky they left all the candles back in Pasadena because if she got anywhere near an open flame right now she’d, well. The obvious.

Even without the candles though, the night’s ritual must go on. She’s barely done a circuit of the house to make sure it’s body-free and defensible when Sheldon’s on her in the tiny living room, mouth finding that spot just below her ear that, without fail, makes her go weak at the knees. If they had the candles now they’d both go up in flames.

He lowers her to the floor and they’re both clawing at buttons and zips and when he pushes into her she’s expecting it to hurt because she didn’t realize she was already wet. He comes first, making a noise like a wounded animal, and Penny tries to get her hand between them so she can finish herself off, but his thumb finds her clit first and she thinks he makes the same noise again but then realizes it’s her own voice as her back arches off the floor.

* * *

The next morning it’s hot before sunrise and Penny stacks as many extra water bottles in the truck as she can manage. Sheldon looks dubious about this for the first time.

“Can you fix the engine if we break down in the middle of the desert?”

“Depends what’s wrong with it.”

“Maybe we should start traveling at night and resting during the day.”

Penny gestures at the road ahead with its cars dotted here and there. “How were you planning to navigate around that mess? Did you evolve dolphin radar?” She starts making pinging noises; Sheldon just mutters, “ _Sonar_ ,” and otherwise ignores her.

They end up making a start because it seems pointless to waste the morning, even if they have to pull over at noon. It can’t be that bad; surely people drove along this highway during the day all the time. Of course, they had working cell phones and roadside assistance weren’t just as likely to maul them to death as to reinflate their tires.

“Two states!” Sheldon says mid-morning, sounding absurdly pleased with himself, and Penny glances into the rearview mirror to see the back of a large sign; they are in Utah now. She wonders how Salt Lake City held up; was God there for them, at the end? Or are the churches full of bodies?

Better not to think about that, perhaps.

Sheldon tries his phone again and, although she focuses on the road ahead with its shimmering heat-haze creating the illusion of rising water, she can still hear the tinny sound of Leonard’s voicemail greeting. She blinks hard a few times but it doesn’t stop the shimmer from doubling, especially when Sheldon leaves a message that she’s quite convinced Leonard will never hear.

The radio is flat white noise again right across the band and it’s vaguely disturbing, like something from a horror movie. Penny half expects a voice to speak from the static but there’s nothing, and Sheldon turns it off then curls up as best as he can in his seat and closes his eyes.

“Is there any way we can go around Vegas?” he asks a few minutes later, making her jump; she’d been sure he was asleep.

“Not really. We don’t have to go right into the middle, you know. We can take a few surface roads.”

“I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

Penny huffs an exasperated sigh. “Sheldon, if you tell me you’ve been dreaming about some guy from a book taking over half the States, you can get out and walk.”

“I haven’t been dreaming. I just don’t think Vegas is safe.”

Only when she’s positive he’s napping does she murmur, “Bullshit.”

* * *

Penny hates it when Sheldon’s right.

They’re driving in what passes for the pre-dawn cool out here. Penny’s squinting in the semi-dark at a roadmap and trying to figure out how many miles to Vegas, how many car wrecks to steer around, how many times they’ll need to refuel, when Sheldon practically stomps on the brakes and the truck screeches to a halt.

“What the fuck, Sheldon—”

“Quiet!”

As if they can be heard from a mile out.

They’ve probably been seen, though. Penny can see what Sheldon’s seen, now; a tower either side of the road, sweeping searchlights and all.

“They can’t have fenced off the whole place in this short a time.”

“They don’t need to.” Sheldon’s knuckles are white on the wheel. “They just need to cover the major roads. Penny, we have to turn back.”

Up ahead, a siren sounds briefly and is cut off.

“I think it’s too late for that.”

They change seats and Penny creeps the truck forward. The guard towers look hastily built, but stable. She can see people with guns; not good. She can’t see any bodies at all, not even outside the barrier around the city that the towers imply. She eases the truck right up to the towers and waits for one of them to come to her, and he does, making the universal gesture: open your window.

When she opens it the stink of bodies hits her like something palpable and she retches. The guard stands impassive. He has a surgical mask across his nose and mouth, but his words are clear anyway.

“Any bites?”

“No.”

“What about your friend there?”

“He’s fine.”

“He don’t look fine.”

“He’s just tired.” Penny injects a little snap into her voice. “We drove all the way from Burbank and, in case you hadn’t noticed, the highway doesn’t have all that many hotels in case of zombie apocalypse.” She’s not sure what prompts her to lie about their point of origin, but she does it anyway.

Just in case Sheldon’s right about this too.

The guard snickers, but keeps the gun trained on Sheldon. “Wake him up. I wanna hear him talk.”

Penny shakes Sheldon’s shoulder, although she’s positive he’s already awake. “Hey. We’re there.”

Sheldon wakes up, or appears to. “We’re in Vegas already? But we only just left home.”

The guard snickers. “He don’t sound all that lucid. You sure he’s not infected?”

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

“Okay, okay.” He gets a certain look in his eyes, a look Penny might have responded to once upon a time, once before the end of the world. “So anyway, how you doin’?”

“Stop it, Joe,” the guard’s companion interjects, finally coming over from beneath the tower. He too holds a gun, but looks even more uncomfortable with it in his hands. “Just let them pass. If there’s anything wrong with them the big guy would’ve known.”

“Who’s the big guy?” Penny asks.

“You’ll meet him if you spend enough time in Vegas.”

“We were actually just passing through.”

Now both of them laugh. The sound holds very little humor. “Nobody just passes through. It’s too nice here,” the one called Joe says, and Penny can’t help but roll her eyes. Sheldon has retreated into silence and stays that way as Penny gives their names – well, Jenny and Lee; she’s as wary of giving their real names as she was of giving their real hometown – and gets given a map showing her where to go to get assigned housing.

She follows the map to a degree. The inhabited areas are lit up well enough that she can navigate through them. There are no bodies on the streets, living or otherwise.

“Do you think we should check out this housing base and see if we can at least get some more food?” she asks.

“I don’t, but it’s probably the only way,” Sheldon says. He sounds cautiously relieved, probably because they’re not being hunted by crows or villagers with flaming torches.

So Penny drives them to one of the brightest-lit places, a hotel near the end of the Strip, whose former name has been covered over with a giant bedsheet sign reading _South_ _Vegas Housing Commission_. It seems the power’s still on in Vegas; no candles needed here, unless one misses the scent of sweetpea and roses. She does. A little.

She parks outside, persuades Sheldon to get out of the truck, and settles a holstered pistol at her hip, draping the tail of her t-shirt over it.

Just in case.

There’s a pretty brunette woman behind the desk even though it can’t be later than six in the morning by now; she greets them with a sleepily cheerful smile.

“New to Vegas?” she asks. “Welcome to the city. We can get you fixed up with a place, but before we do, we just need to check you’re definitely not bitten.”

“What do you want, a strip search?” Penny says, half laughing, sobering up when the answer is yes. The receptionist rings a bell and someone comes walking out from a side room, and Sheldon visibly tenses.

“Hey, Rob, what’s new – well, well, well.”

“ _Wheaton_ ,” Sheldon growls.

“Robin, get on the phone to HQ and tell them we need someone down here right away. Winkle, I think. The big guy’s going to want to talk to this man.”

Robin picks up the phone and dials, Wil grabs Sheldon’s arm, and Penny’s between them before she’s really thinking about what she’s doing, breaking Wil’s hold by simply grabbing his thumb and bending it back way further than it should really go. He reaches for her with his other hand and Penny grinds her heel down on the toe of his shoe, sending him hopping backward.

“What the hell?” she snaps at him.

Wil cradles his hand against his chest; Robin is talking quickly into the phone, casting Penny a frightened look. Penny takes a moment out from glaring at Wil to reach over the desk and tap the cutoff button; she’s pretty sure that’s not a phone call that should be completed.

“You don’t get it. Moonpie here could become a very valued member of this community,” Wil says. He shifts his gaze to Sheldon. “You’d be the number one scientist here. You’re better than anyone else we’ve got so far. You’d get your own lab with whatever you need to continue your research.”

Penny can see that Sheldon’s wavering. She grabs his hand, but he’s looking at Wil, who keeps talking.

“Assistants, if you want them. All the whiteboards you need. You’d just have to do a little work for the big guy once in a while, and you’d get free rein the rest of the time. Doesn’t that sound like a dream come true?”

Sheldon blinks once, twice, and then says, “There weren’t any dreams,” like this is actually out of the fucking book and not just Wil playing mind games with him. _Fool me once..._

Wil spreads his hands. “It’s a metaphor. Or something. The point is that you’ll get to play with all the power you want.”

Penny never read _The Stand_ , just watched the mini-series one time, so her memories are hazy, but she remembers one thing: having all the power you want is the last thing you want.

“Sheldon, we have to go.” She pulls on his hand. She can’t believe he’s stupid enough to fall for this. _Fool me twice.._

On the other side of the counter, Robin’s got the phone to her ear again. Penny reaches for it and this time Robin skips backward so Penny can’t stop the call. Worse, someone’s just walked into the hotel foyer behind them and the best Penny can hope for at the moment is that whoever it is isn’t dead.

“Stuie!” Wil is audibly relieved. “Get Cooper and his lady-friend here headed up to the Grand. Winkle’s on her way down to collect them, right, Rob?” Robin nods an affirmative.

The next thing Penny knows, shy quiet Stuart from the comic book store has a gun trained on her and, although he looks shaky, it seems he’s unafraid to shoot. Beside him, Bernadette – _Bernadette_! – has a second gun on Sheldon.

“Move it,” she says, and Penny considers going for her own gun, but she knows how that would end. Instead she follows Sheldon’s lead as he turns and stalks out of the hotel. She does glance back to see what Wil’s doing, if he’s following them, but he’s just leaning over the reception desk as Robin hands him an ice pack for his hand. _It was only your thumb, you baby_ , she thinks.

“That your truck?” Stuart asks, nodding at it.

“Yeah.” Penny feels dispirited and a little scared; there’s something hard in Stuart’s face that she’s never seen before.

“Get in. I’ll tell you where to drive.”

Penny slides into the driver’s seat. This Stuart is a stranger with a gun and she doesn’t want to disobey him. Sheldon gets in beside her and sits stiffly upright, Bernadette keeping her gun trained on the back of his head as she climbs in behind him. Penny doesn’t know pistols as well as she knows rifles but they look like police issue and if the two of them are some sort of secret police here in Vegas then she has no idea what the fuck is going on. She starts the truck as Stuart slams his door.

Stuart gives her terse directions and Penny follows them, turning left and then right. She doesn’t know the streets here at all, but she’s pretty sure that they’re headed away from the Strip, not toward it. Bernadette hasn’t said anything to her, not even when Penny meets her eyes in the rear view mirror and tries to silently ask what the hell is going on.

Another siren sounds, like a yapping dog, this one closer to the center of town. This one isn’t cut, off but builds and builds.

“Faster,” Stuart says, and Penny hears rather than sees him shift around to look out of the back window as she speeds up. There’s a flash of light between the buildings ahead; she reflexively blinks and then has to swerve as someone runs into the road ahead of her, waving their arms for her to stop.

“ _Move! Move! Move!_ ” Bernadette screams out the window. “ _We have to get this shit out of town before it leaks!_ ” And she jerks her thumb at the gas cans in the truck’s bed and jerks her gun at the person standing in the road, who looks at her, looks at the approaching truck, and makes a dive out of the way, cradling their head. Not ten yards further down the road are the guard towers, but the second guard has heard Bernadette’s shriek and is standing well back.

They barrel between the towers and out of Vegas without so much as one bullet aimed their way, thanks to Bernadette’s ruse. The siren keeps wailing, and maybe they’ll have five minutes before someone works out where they’ve gone and maybe they’ll have five hours, but for now they’re out and headed east.

Stuart drops his gun heedlessly onto the floor between his feet and lets out a shuddering sigh. Bernadette is more careful with hers, making sure the safety is on before setting it on the center seat.

“Oh, Penny, it’s so good to see you!” she says, sounding on the verge of tears.

“Sheldon, I didn’t think you’d survived San Diego,” Stuart puts in.

Sheldon’s back goes even stiffer, if that’s possible. “I didn’t think anyone did.”

“I didn’t go this year.” Quietly, Stuart adds, “I couldn’t afford it.”

“Would one of you like to explain to me what the hell just happened?” Penny asks as reasonably as she can under the circumstances.

Their words tumble over each other. They’d heard about Boulder too, made their way individually as far as Vegas and been caught in the so-called “big guy’s” web. Neither of them ever met the alleged man at the top of things, but the number of people with guns politely requesting that they get on with their ordered task was highly persuasive. Eventually they got guns of their own for self-defense, just in case someone decided that Bernadette’s research was too risky. She was researching the virus that caused the zombie infections and Stuart was her gofer, purely by chance.

“We’re pretty sure that they were planning to have Bernie synthesize the virus so they could use it on anyone they didn’t like,” Stuart says.

Penny raises an eyebrow. “‘Bernie’?”

“Things change after an apocalypse.” Bernadette sounds defensive, but she’s got her hand over Stuart’s on the seat between them, beside the gun, and she doesn’t look like she plans to let go.

“It’s only been six weeks,” Penny says, but she’s looking sidelong at the man she’d never imagined would have sex with anyone and she knows how his skin tastes and the exact noises he makes when he comes and she knows that six weeks is more than enough time to change anyone’s worldview.

“Did any of the others...” Sheldon looks out of his window instead of finishing the sentence.

“We don’t know,” Bernadette and Stuart say together.

The sound of the siren is dwindling behind them. Penny’s hands relax a little bit on the wheel. They’re driving off into the sunrise instead of the sunset, but that’s only fair, since this is more like the beginning of the story than the end.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Shadow at Morning](https://archiveofourown.org/works/258260) by [Lauren (notalwaysweak)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/notalwaysweak/pseuds/Lauren)




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